WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) — Hillary Clinton is so confident of victory in November that she is refining the details of her agenda, assembling a cabinet, and picking her first Supreme Court appointment.

This is the gist of a story planted — sorry, there’s no other word for it — in the Washington Post over the weekend.

There is only one problem with this largely unsourced article (presumably parroting the spin of Clinton campaign aides) — Donald Trump has not completely disappeared from view.

Clinton’s lead over Trump in the polls widened in the weeks following the nominating conventions — immeasurably aided by the Republican nominee’s own missteps — to the point that it did indeed start to look like an election with only one viable candidate.

But following yet another shakeup of the Trump campaign and several days of Trump not getting in the way of bad news for Clinton, the gap in the polls is starting to narrow again.

In fact, the Los Angeles Times/USC tracking poll actually shows Trump pulling ahead, prompting the herd of Clinton apologists to quickly explain that the “unorthodox” methodology of this poll skewed results in favor of Trump and makes the survey an outlier.

The FBI released interview notes that said Clinton told the FBI that one of her predecessors as secretary of state, Colin Powell, had advised her to use private email, confirming a decision she had already made.

But this assertion clearly ruffled the feathers of the normally unflappable Powell, who told People magazine that “Her people have been trying to pin it on me.”

Clinton had been using her own server for a year, Powell said, when he sent her a memo explaining how private emails had helped in that period before the State Department had a workable system of its own or rules against using private emails.

Why would Clinton make such a claim, he was asked. “Why do you think?” Powell snapped back.

Then the news comes out that the FBI has found some 15,000 of those 30,000-plus emails that were supposedly personal and deleted, and a federal judge has ordered accelerated release of whichever of those emails are determined not to be personal after all.

This sets a drumbeat of more bad email news that increasingly drowns out the Democratic nominee’s efforts to make her case based on policy.

And it takes place against a background of corrosive bad publicity from conservative media, social networking and bestselling books.

Three of the top four nonfiction hardcover best sellers in the New York Times Book Review on Sunday were anti-Hillary Clinton screeds (“Hillary’s America” by Dinesh D’Souza, “Crisis of Character” by Gary Byrne, and “Armageddon” by Dick Morris), and the fourth, “Liars” by Glenn Beck, was a more general assault on the liberal agenda that certainly has no kind words for Clinton.

Bloomberg pundit Mark Halperin and his guest co-host on “With All Due Respect,” Donny Deutsch, couldn’t for the life of them figure out why there should be disproportionately so many negative books about Clinton, and virtually none about Trump.

“It’s a bit of a mystery to me,” Halperin concluded, bringing a snort of derision from the conservative website NewsBusters as it reported the discussion.

The anti-Clinton books have moved out of the top spots in the latest best-seller lists online but are still in the top 10 both for hardcover and for combined e-book and print lists. The best-seller list for hardcover graphic novels, meanwhile, is topped by “Clinton Cash,” a comic book version of last year’s nonfiction best seller by Peter Schweitzer.

Clinton seems determined to give her critics even more ammunition.

After Hillary Clinton disingenuously blamed Powell for her bad judgment on emails, former President Bill Clinton announced that the Clinton Foundation — a constant source of controversy over conflicts of interest — would stop accepting donations from foreign entities — when and if the former first lady wins the election in November.

Critics pounced on this. If there was not a conflict of interest when she was secretary of state, why would there be one when she is president? If there is a conflict of interest, why wait until November?

The Clinton tendency to parse ethics — not to mention a soupçon of greed in the timing — is too readily evident in this half-measure.

Clinton still has an unfavorable rating of more than 53% (with only 43% favorable) in the Real Clear Politics polling average. That is down from 56% before the conventions but showing no signs of declining further. (Trump’s unfavorable is nearly 63% vs. 33% favorable.)

It is now widely considered Clinton’s election to lose, but she seems to be doing her darndest to make that happen.

Darrell
Delamaide

Darrell Delamaide is a political columnist for MarketWatch in Washington. Follow him on Twitter @MKTWDelamaide.

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